We’ve seen all the memes–

“Love Sees No Color.” 

“What color is love?”

“I don’t see color!”

Turns out that if you hear a white man say this, chances are he sees color just fine and is less likely to date you if you’re a black woman, according to a study released in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Say what?

The summary:

People who support a “color-blind” ideology believe the best way to fight race discrimination is to ignore the concept of race altogether. In other words, the ideology affirms the belief “race should not and does not matter,” according to PsyPost. Meanwhile, those who support multiculturalism believe society should accept a multitude of ethnic and cultural groups and celebrate their differences.

With these ideologies in mind, James E. Brooks of Tennessee State University and Helen A. Neville of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sought to observe how these concepts influenced interracial romantic attraction among a cohort of 124 heterosexual black and white college men. The participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of women featured in eight fake online dating profiles. Three of the profiles featured black women, three featured white women, one featured an Asian woman, and one featured a Latina woman. The researchers only focused on the participants’ ratings of the black and white women.

The findings revealed the participants reported greater attraction toward women of their same race. White men were more likely to give higher ratings to white women, and black men were more likely to give higher ratings toward the black women. However, the participants’ ideology greatly influenced their responses. The more a white male believed in a “color-blind” ideology, the less likely he expressed interest in dating one of the black women.

“Thus, although white men endorsed statements which suggest that race does not matter in society, it appeared that race did matter in their personal lives as indicated by their romantic attraction,” wrote the researchers.

Unlike the white participants, no correlation was found between black participants who believed in “color-blindness” and their attraction to white women. Black participants who supported this ideology were less attracted to women of their own race.

Multiculturalism had a different effect on interracial romantic attraction. In other words, the more a participant believed in multiculturalism, the more likely they were to be attracted to women of another race. This held true for both black and white participants.

So what’s the takeaway here? Perhaps you should looking to men who don’t want to ignore race and culture and pretend it doesn’t matter and look to men who welcome and celebrate the diversity of all people. “So, although attitudes about interracial dating suggest we are more accepting as a society, the truth is even those who believe in “color-blindness” ideologies contribute to the racial biasthat still exists, says Lizette Borreli, author of the original article.